Carmack: Quake Live Plays To PC Strengths

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Carmack was talking up Quake Live today over on Gamasutra. “A lot of this project was about doing something that the PC was going to be better at than the consoles,” he told the big G. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Carmack’s comments is that he wants to see some of the web functionality from things like social networking sites to find their way into the browser-based game platform. “”For years, I’ve often thought about the fact that a lot of people spend vastly more time on websites and forums about the games that they’re playing than they actually spend playing the games themselves. We hope to have some aspect of that here.”

I think John Carmack has planned this for a looooooooooooooooooooooooooong time.

Lets look to the original QuakeWorld “.plan” file:

link to bluesnews.com
“Here is The New Plan:
…
Users will have a persistant account, and all frags on the entire internet
will be logged. I want us to be able to give a global ranking order of
everyone playing the game. You should be able to say, “I am one of the
ten best QuakeWorld players in existance”, and have the record to back
it up. There are all sorts of other cool stats that we could mine out
of the data: greatest frags/minute, longest uninterrupted quake game,
cruelest to newbies, etc, etc.”

Basically whats happened in markets around the world. Former AAA developers turning into subscription or microtransaction based game studios for the PC because of piracy or just market trends of people not buying highend tech games anymore. Then focusing the main titles (rage, doom) on the consoles.

Also, Agreed, why hype something up to this degree if they do not have the capacity to achieve the demand?, uh what hype? Id have hardly been at every street corner peddling it like Microsoft were with Halo 3. What coverage it has had has usually been fairly descreet.

The servers finally seem to have settled down. I love Quake Wars for the frenetic pace but Q3 is just holy shit wtf insane. I kind of quit playing games while in college when this came out originally so I missed it. Everything else, Red Orchestra, COD4, whatever is an old man’s shooter compared to Q3. I simply don’t have the reflexes to pull off midair twisting headshots anymore.

The question: do Id spend money to add capacity to serve ads to eventually pay for added capacity? How many of the initial surge will stick around to become regular players? How many of the initial surge are being turned away permanently by the queues?

An unenviable quandry.

But it’s going to open the floodgates for other games to be developed/adapted around this model if they get it right.

Quake is ridiculous popular. 3 students in finland can make a experimental engine with Quake, and it will get NBC news the next day, as filler. Today consoles, and computers and arcade saloon machines have 3D Graphics Cards, because Quake itself moved the videogame world in that direction (It could have happend withouth it, but it was there to do it). Quake is the influential. Quake is to gaming what Aristotle is to philosophy. Is like the background, over where new games are painted. And I wish it would be different…
I suspect theres a horde of ex-gamers where the only method of getting his interest is dropping the name Quake. People with a family, that has not played games in years.
So Quake is like the nexus betwen software, hardware, gamers and ex-gamers.

“It’ll be interesting to see if hardcore people play full-screen still,” he says — Quake Live allows for a full-screen mode.

“But I suspect that probably there will be a lot more people, as our user base grows, who are playing it just in the browser window,” Carmack suggests — but he anticipates more players will use the browser mode, in order to receive notifications from friends or juggle other web tasks.

Why would you not play full-screen? I didnt for a moment imagine that anyone would play in the browser window. If I hadn’t made the game I would be tempted to ask if he’d ever played it, a game of Quake 3 isn’t going to be much fun if you stop to reply to messages on MSN every 30 seconds.

“Oh don’t frag me a second i’m typing”…….

If there is a game that epitomises the notion of “blink and your dead” its quake.

Finally got out of my browser crash loop, and I have to say the game’s a lot more fun than I expected. Alas, thus far I’ve only managed to play bot matches, but those guys are a lot of fun too, and such good sports what with the smileys when I frag them.